“Ow.” Charlie’s first word after rising from the dead.
Hoffmann straddled Charlie on the dentist’s chair. Her face was pale and perspiring, and dipped low enough that Charlie could bite it off if she wanted, which she didn’t.
“You are okay,” Hoffmann said. “You are okay.”
“I’m okay.” Charlie’s voice was marbles. “Etta, shh.”
“The fuck,” Hart panted.
“Look at her eyes,” Lowenstein said in an awed hush.
“This isn’t—” Marion began. “This hasn’t—”
“They’re clear,” Lowenstein said. “They’re totally clear.”
“The fuck,” Hart repeated.
Images from the San Diego morgue spouted from her mind as if from a hatchet wound. She saw John Doe’s head turn on his neck, the simplest thing, followed by the sour-milk orbs of his eyes looking first at Luis, then her. Madre de Dios, Luis had said. How long after a body dies? she’d stammered.
This time, she was John Doe.
Hoffmann crawled off Charlie, collapsed to the floor, clambered back up, and raided the table drawer so brusquely the bolt-gun box atop it skidded off the edge. Charlie’s mind coruscated, every memory too colorful, swelling, ready be plucked like berries. She saw Lowenstein cradle the bolt gun to his chest, inadvertently aiming it at his chin, and heard, clear as music, her last conversation with Luis: Right in the middle of the head. Straight at the brain.
“Lowenstein.” Her tongue was far behind her brain. “Be careful, would you?”
He glanced at the bolt gun, shuddered, and held it away from his body.
The drawer rattled. Hoffmann swiveled. In her hands were all the tools the librarian ever needed: paper and pencil. For four years, Charlie had watched with pride as Hoffmann weaned herself from obsession. Still a zealot for routine, though. She commandeered the room’s stool, perched atop it, and used her own thighs as a writing surface. Personal Histories were her job, and she knew, before Charlie appreciated it herself, that no page in any Archive binder had a record of anything like this.
“What happened?” Good old Hoffmann.
Charlie tried to think. Her memory was cratering. Details were going like the teeth once pulled in this dentist’s chair. That included the sensory recollections that would have been most pleasing to translate, if it had been real. She thought it was? Most of what she’d experienced seemed separated from her mind by a thin layer of algae. She only had to dip a finger beneath it, a full hand if she were feeling bold, to have it back in her grasp.
“I’ll tell you what didn’t happen. She didn’t get bit. Who said she got bit?” Lowenstein grimaced. “I almost bolted Charlie in the fucking head!”
“She was bit,” Marion said.
“Not by a zombie, she wasn’t!”
“This is what I do,” Marion snapped.
“Not anymore, it isn’t,” Lowenstein growled.
“It’s what we both do!” Marion gestured at Charlie. “Were you bit by a zombie or weren’t you?”
Charlie withdrew the finger she’d been trailing through the algae’s psychedelic sheen. She blinked at the eight waiting eyes. Had she been bit? She pictured the Chief’s apologetic face as she closed her jaws on Charlie’s fingers. Or was apologetic the wrong word? Maybe it had been sympathetic. Maybe the Chief had known she was passing to Charlie not a death sentence but a birth certificate.
“She’s groggy,” Hart said. “She doesn’t know what you’re saying.”
“No one in here knows what they’re saying!” Lowenstein cried.
“What did you see?” Hoffmann pressed.
“Etta, please!” Marion shouted.
Charlie’s face ached; she realized she was wincing. There was so much she’d felt in those minutes of death; there was so much more she’d felt while dipping back into it. Oceanic depths of peace, cheesy as that sounded, and an infinity of unrestricted love, even cheesier. It had softened her, Mae Rutkowski’s Bronx bombshell, which is why these people’s hard noises, amplified by the Dying Room’s bare walls, made her recoil like a child. These were the emotions zombies had tried to end. To have them run this hot, this fast, scared her.
“Please.” Her voice was muffled under leather, and a flash of the room’s anger infected her. “Can someone take this fucking thing off me?”
She heard the clunk of the bolt gun placed on the floor and felt Lowenstein’s hands on her head. Her hair got caught in the band and she cried out, not from pain but more anger, spraying in a gush. Seconds later, the muzzle was gone and other smells and tastes poured in—the ripe sweat of these people, the precise piquancy of their panic. Charlie wiggled feeling back into her numb face, and hoped the prickling sensation was death, calmly inching back through her body.
“I can’t explain it,” she gasped. “I’m sorry, I can’t.”
She blinked at Marion in apology, realizing she’d failed to absolve her. Marion’s jaw dangled like the medical mask from her ear.
“Hart,” she said. “Get those straps off.”
For half a minute, the only sounds in the room were the soft chimes and thwaps of Hart unbuckling the chair straps. Charlie only noticed the rasp of Hoffmann’s scribbling when it stopped. Unlike the other three, the librarian was undamaged and undaunted.
“What did you learn?”
Relief broke inside Charlie. Hoffmann might yet save them all.
“You’ve gotten so good at this, Etta,” Charlie said. “You ask all the right questions.”
Hoffmann, per usual, had no use for praise. Charlie smiled. Hoffmann hadn’t changed that much. The librarian raised impatient eyebrows, but how could Charlie speak past a grin that kept growing? These were the four best living beings on Earth, and it was shit luck the task of articulating death’s inexpressible glories had fallen to an ineloquent broad like her.
“Charlie?” Hoffmann prodded.
Charlie hugged herself. It felt good. She ran her hands up her neck, the sides of her face, into her hair. She didn’t care who saw. Around her breasts, over her stomach, along her hips. She didn’t care. Down her thighs, against her crotch. For a handful of seconds, she’d been the whole universe, and it had been wonderful. Just as wonderful was having this body. Its fragility was the point. A single body like this couldn’t win shit. But a single body could inspire other bodies toward the same goal. This was what she had to tell them.
“Are you the…?” Lowenstein sounded adrift.
“It can’t be true,” Marion whispered.
“The last?” Hart managed. “Charlie, were you … the last?”
“The first.” Hoffmann’s look challenged anyone to disagree. “She was the first.”
The Dying Room doorknob rattled; Marion was gripping it to steady herself. She tore her mask the rest of the way off, and it floated to the blood-spattered floor like a document of outdated rules. Marion pressed the heel of her free palm into one eye socket, then the other.
“We can’t rush this,” she mumbled. “It could be a fluke.”
“No fluke,” Charlie said. “I can feel it.”
“We have to tell people,” Hart insisted.
“I can hear it in my blood,” Charlie said.
“There will be pandemonium,” Marion said. “We have to confirm it.”
“How?” Hart cried. “Go kill someone?”
“Can’t you see it?” Charlie asked. “In the air?”
Lowenstein snapped his fingers. “A rat. We find a rat, kill it. If it doesn’t come back…”
Marion nodded. “Okay. All right. Where do we—” She laughed. “The one time you want a rat.”
“The bay,” Lowenstein said. “The pier ruins. There’s always rats.”
He scrambled. Charlie heard the bolt gun kicked across the floor, no longer needed, maybe not ever again, and when Lowenstein passed the foot of the dentist’s chair, he squeezed Charlie’s calf, and though it wasn’t sensual in the way Charlie had always defined it, a voltaic sensation shot up he
r leg, erotic in the way everything now felt faster, brighter, deeper. She gasped, and it turned into a laugh.
Marion blocked the door. “Bring your stompers! Some of those rats will be zombies! Hart, go with him, don’t let him do this alone. And be careful!”
Hart nodded, heaved for air, broke into a delighted grin, and dropped Charlie a wink. It was nearly as good as a touch. She hugged herself more tightly, digging her fingernails into her ribs, twisting her legs, curling her toes. Marion stepped away from the door, and Hart and Lowenstein scrambled out like eight-year-olds on summer vacation.
Marion braced her arms on the chair. Charlie reacted without thought, twining her arms up Marion’s the way she’d done with lovers. She had no plan to kiss Marion Castle, that cool-headed pro, the idea was preposterous, but look at that: Marion let the weight of Charlie’s arms pull her into the chair, and they kissed, lips plumped to lips. Marion broke it off and snuggled into Charlie’s shoulder, and Charlie roped her in her arms, and they stroked each other’s hair, and learned their tears had the same temperatures and weights. Charlie extended a hand to Hoffmann, knowing the librarian would give it an alien’s stare, but look at that: Hoffmann took it, and Charlie held on hard—no take-backs, like the girls used to say in Parkchester—and the three women held together, one silent, two laughing and weeping, because it was over, it was over, it was over.
“No more zombies?” Marion whispered. “No more softies?”
“No more Eggshell,” Charlie whispered.
“No more Lace.”
“No more Talcum.”
Charlie wiped Marion’s tears; Marion wiped hers.
“I’m glad you sent the boys away,” Charlie laughed.
“Critter huntin’,” Marion giggled. “All they’re good for.”
They both angled their heads toward Hospice’s main room, as if they might hear the two idiots spreading the word before they should. What they heard instead was the burble of Caretaker talk, rarely ever this loud and never this fearful. Hart and Lowenstein must have left Hospice’s front door open in their haste. A louder, lower noise snaked all the way to the dentist’s chair like a browbeaten dog.
These voices were not the two she’d heard shouting before she’d died. These were voices in the dozens, a freight-train roar. Charlie’s cozy, cotton swaddling began to cool, crack, and flake. The people she heard were unified, the thing for which she’d hoped, but for ugly reasons. Marion grabbed her hard, and when Charlie heard the splinter of disemboweled wood, she grabbed back.
We Made This Happen
Bare hands ripped down the door. Previously, the Face had only seen destruction like this carried out by zombies, who didn’t care when fingers snapped back or palms got shredded. The first strikes had been with solid objects, including a board stamped DRY AGED BEEF, wrested from the crate on which Lindof and Nishimura had been standing. Mad-dog mania took over fast. The Brick Magazine might be brick, but the door was wood. With so many people heaving at it, it was going down.
The Face was knocked about. He spotted Nishimura through the tumult, on the ground beside the crate’s remains, holding his bloodied forehead. Nishimura’s mouth was moving, but the Face didn’t believe audible words were making it out; the man looked to be in shock.
Forty or fifty people pressed at the Brick Magazine; the first few managed to push past the long shards of the broken door. It was too much for a single man like him to fight. Wasn’t it? The Face pictured Nathan Baseman making Chuck Corso his offer: risk it all, take Feed 8, and become what ChuckSux69 only pretended to be, a TRUTH TELLER.
The Face dove into the scrum, peeling people away from the door. Some whirled, teeth bared, ready to punch, only for their frenzy to collapse upon seeing the Face. He kept driving until he lodged himself, bloodied by elbows and knees, against the brick surface beside what used to be the door. People poured inside. Screams came from the second floor. No teleprompter here, but the two weeks after 10/23 proved he could monologue when his back, literally now, was against a wall. He grabbed the lapels of the next person trying to get inside.
“Think what you’re doing! It isn’t just those people inside! It’s all of us! Think what you’re doing to all of us!”
The man flung his arms away and dove inside. The Face snagged a woman’s wrist.
“Karl was right! We have to be better! We have to be better right now!”
She contorted her face at his misshapen visage and kicked him in the shin. He cried out, releasing her; she tumbled inside. An old man was next, reaching for the sharp splinters of the door with what looked like starving hands. The Face grabbed the back of his coat collar.
“We have to remember! Witch hunts, and lynch mobs, and frontier justice—”
“Let go of me!” the man growled.
“Do you want us to go down like that, in the new history?”
The man punched the Face in the nose. His head shot against brick. Black starbursts, red agony, first at the rear of his skull, next torrid from the center of his face. Like that, the Face was back in Slowtown, the instant Nishimura had gone for the holstered gun and grazed the Face’s cheek with a pinkie. It had been a slap to everyone’s face, a sudden, blasting reminder of the truth they’d pretended to forget; he was hideous, and no one but a zombie wanted to be close to that slick, seamed flesh, the sole ear, the half nose, the scar-tissue eye hoods and lipless mouth. The blood gushing from his nostrils looked black in the night, and that felt right; a monster like he was would not have red blood.
“Let go of me, you ugly, ugly fuck,” the old man spat. “Ugly fucks like you ought to be put out of your misery.”
The man clambered inside like a rat, whiskered face pushing past slivered wood. Others burrowed in behind. The Face’s hands crept over the remains of his face as he slid down the wall to the cold ground. He was Chuck Corso again: coiffed, outfitted by Armani, a pole on which models could swing, an idolator of reflective surfaces.
A renewed huzzah went up as what was left of the door was kicked open from inside. A train of savagely grinning Fort Yorkers dragged out the Blockhouse Four. Their features were inflated from beatings: noses flattened or sideways, dislodged teeth stuck to their bloody cheeks and necks. One held his arm oddly, a bone jutting from the skin.
First was Stuart Shardlow, Old Muddy’s best hope when it came to ham radio, who’d donated his staggering collection of driver’s licenses to the New Library, a handsome, blond-haired, all-American sort able to recite bygone baseball stats like psalms, and whose ubiquitous, bloodred, St. Louis Cardinals cap had been replaced by actual blood. Next came Reed Hollis, a guy who exasperated Nishimura, but whom the Face liked, as he could see how badly Reed desired a couch-potato life, not to freeload but rather to spend more time with his de facto wife and their two adopted girls. Mandy Moundson was third, the only woman in the foursome, and the only one, of course, stripped of her shirt, who’d become famous at Old Muddy for styling hair and giving professional shaves, and whose beach-gull laughs could be heard for blocks and bore a similarity to her sobbing. Last came Federico Riera, a quiet, brave man who’d been patiently, gradually cross-referencing New Library texts to log new species of plants and animals, a task he wouldn’t soon return to, given that compound fracture.
The Face believed he heard Lindof shouting orders, but the voice was puny beneath the din. A detached section of the Face’s brain noted how quickly Lindof had stopped mattering. He’d been a fuse, that’s all, and post-explosion, he was little but a sulfurous smell. No one was chanting the names of Shyam and Yong-Sun either; they’d been but excuses. While many had fled, masses crowded close, tiger-striped from torches, emitting screeching, noxious clouds of combustible hate. The mob formed into a procession that curled south, along the stone wall, toward the Circular’s embrasures. They licked their lips. They rubbed their crotches. They wanted it so badly and had been chaste for so long.
A hand grabbed the Face and pulled. He pulled back.
“Let go!” he
shouted, no different from the old man, no better.
The voice was calm. “Face.”
“Don’t look at me!”
How could any voice be calm? “Face.”
He let his arm be pulled from his face, the cracking open of a lobster, his flaccid white meat exposed, to be slobbered down a buttered gullet. A woman knelt on the grass before him. He rolled his head to avoid her, but she mirrored it with a roll of her own, and that bit of tenacity was enough to break his spirit. He scrunched up his face, which only made it uglier, and looked back.
Etta Hoffmann still wore her boots, rucksack, and fanny pack from Slowtown. She looked as unbothered by his disfigurement as ever. Perhaps it was because she’d just seen worse: the death of her only friend. She read his mind and shook her head.
“She’s not dead.”
“What? Who?”
“Charlie.”
“Etta, I’m sorry. I’m sorry, but she’ll die. Sometimes it takes longer.”
“No. She’s normal.”
“It’s a disaster here, Etta, they broke in, dragged them out, they’re crazy—”
“Charlie came back. She came back normal.”
Her everyday tone was what let her words slip into him, like a hand through drilling rain. What she said was simple and impossible. The Face believed no other imaginable statement, at this instant, could have had made him stop and think. The Face might have the rep for truth-telling, but Hoffmann was a step beyond, constitutionally incapable of distortions, aggrandizements, or hyperbole. If she said Charlie Rutkowski had survived a zombie bite, then—
The Face bolted upward, the Brick Magazine furrowing his back.
Then it was true, and it should, it would, it must change everything.
“Nishimura.” A miserable sound, not fit for broadcast. The Face cleared his throat of swallowed blood, self-pity, and fear. “Karl!”
The Living Dead Page 65